We would have to know their intent to really know if they fit a general understanding "the good guys."
Its very possible that China is open sourcing LLMs because its currently in their best interest to do so, not because of some moral or principled stance.
But that's precisely why Meta are the "good guys". They specifically called China the good guys in the same way that Meta is the good guys, though in this case many of the Chinese models are extremely good.
Meta has open sourced all of their offerings purely to try to commoditize the industry to the greatest extent possible, hoping to avoid their competitors getting a leg up. There is zero altruism or good intentions.
If Meta had actually competitive AI offering, there is zero chance they would be releasing any of it.
The country ruled by "people's party" has almost no open source culture while capitalism is leading the entire free software movement. I'm not sure what that says about our society and politics but the absurdist in me is having a good laugh every time I think about this :D
There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people. The government just doesn’t fund it. Not directly anyway, but there’s a ton of Chinese companies that do.
>There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people
Yea exactly, there is also a lot of chinese people out there, statistically a large chunk are cool with it.
Same dynamic as the US can be really - other countries see the US government and think to themselves, "I don't like these US people, look at what their government did" meanwhile US people are like "what do you mean, I don't like what the government did either". That's what a lot of Chinese people are thinking (but now allowed to say, in China criticizing the government is against their community guidelines)
I've recently been exploring PKM/knowledge management programs, and the best open source one is a Chinese project - SiYuan.
I have a feeling that their collaborative hacker culture is more hardware oriented, which would be a natural extension from the tech zones where 500 companies are within a few miles of each other and engineers are rapidly popping in and out and prototyping parts sometimes within a day.
Anecdotally, I've dealt with Chinese collaborative community projects in the ThinkPad space, where they have come together to design custom motherboards to modernize old ThinkPads. Of course there was a lot of software work as well when it comes to BIOS code, Thunderbolt, etc. I remember thinking how watching that project develop was like peering into another world with a parallel hacker culture that just developed... differently.
Oh there's also a Chinese project that's going to modernize old Blackberries with 5G internals. Cool stuff!
China does have their own Github as gitee.com¹ which runs a fork of Gitea but it's basically dead because it's impossible to have anything like Github with the current censorship aparatus. Here's the excerpt from wiki:
> On 18 May 2022, Gitee announced all code will be manually reviewed before public availability.[4][5] Gitee did not specify a reason for the change, though there was widespread speculation it was ordered by the Chinese government amid increasing online censorship in China.[4][6]
I won't pretend to be deeply familiar with China, but I think of two reasons: China doesn't take IP law seriously, so they can just copy, pirate whatever anyway. And the West has more wealthy idealistic techies with the free time for free software.
Capitalist countries (actually there are no other kinds of economies, in reality) are leading the open source software movement because it is a way for corporations to get software development services and products for free rather than paying for. It's a way of lowering labour costs.
Highly paid software engineers working in a ZIRP economy with skyrocketing compensation packages were absolutely willing to play this game, because "open source" in that context often is/was a resume or portfolio building tool and companies were willing to pay some % of open source developers in order to lubricate the wheels of commerce.
That, I think, is going to change.
Free software, which I interpret as copyleft, is absolutely antithetical to them, and reviled precisely because it gets in the way of getting work for free/cheap and often gets in the way of making money.
Copyleft isn't antithetical, see how many people are paid to work on the Linux kernel. I believe some other ecosystem software is also copylefted, like systemd.
And is building on top of the unpaid labour of SW engineers really a major part of the open source ecosystem? I feel open source is more a way for companies to cooperate in building shared software with less duplication of costs.
I disagree, the corporate open source is just half of the story. Much of free software space is pushed by idealists who can afford to pursue the ideals due to freedoms and finances provided by capitalist systems.
I don't think the intent really matters once the thing is out in the open.
I want open source AI i can run myself without any creepy surveillance capitalist or state agency using it to slurp up my data.
Chinese companies are giving me that - I don't really care about what their grand plan is. Grand plans have a habit of not working out, but open source software is open source software nonetheless.
It's really hard to tell. If instructions like the current extreme trend of "What a great question!" and all the crap that forces one to put
* Do not use emotional reinforcement (e.g., "Excellent," "Perfect," "Unfortunately").
* Do not use metaphors or hyperbole (e.g., "smoking gun," "major turning point").
* Do not express confidence or certainty in potential solutions.
into the instructions, so that it doesn't treat you like a child, teenager or narcissistic individual who is craving for flattery, can really affect the mood and way of thinking of an individual, those Chinese models might as well have baked in something similar but targeted at reducing the productivity of certain individuals or weakening their beliefs in western culture.
I am not saying they are doing that, but they could be doing it sometime down the road without us noticing.
I mean in some sense the Chinese domestic policy (“as in Xi”) made the conditions possible for companies like DeepSeek to rise up, via a multi-decade emphasis on STEM education and providing the right entrepreneurial conditions.
But yeah by analogy with the US, it’s not as if the W. Bush administration can be credited with the creation of Google.
